
Today is Valentines Day, a day that by traditionfriends close friends and those in love exchange greetings and gifts as tokens of expressing their friendship and/or their love. Above is a video card me and Anna sent for your grandfather and grandmother , Baba & Maman. Did you get a Valentine's card from a friend?
People often get accustom to and follow the traditions of the society they grew up in, sometimes without knowing When, How and Why the traditions started. I like you to know something about the history and one of the legends associated with this popularly celebrated day.
Long before Christianity February was celebrated as month of romance in ancient Rome. Romans were also celebrating a Fertility Festival called Lupercalia in the middle of February. At the end of this festival all the young women in the city used to put their names in a big vase and then the bachelors of the city each would draw a name from the vase and would be paired with that girl for the year. It is believed that these matches often used to end in marriage.
The legend is that Saint Valentine was a 3rd century priest in Rome when the Roman Emperor Claudius II who believed the single man make better soldiers made marriage for young men against the law.
Saint Valentine disagreed with this injustice and continued to secretly perform marriage for young lovers. Eventually Claudius discovered Valentine's actions and imprisoned him.

By 1800AD it became common for friends and those in love to exchange written notes and/or small gifts as token of their affections on Valentine's Day. Today on Valentine's Day about 1,000,000,000 Valentine's Day greeting cards are exchanged? Only at Christmas more cards are exchanged, about 2.6 billion.
It is believed to be highly probable that the Christian Church decided to put St. Valentine's feast in the middle of February in an attempt to Christianize the highly popular festival of Lupercalia. The Lupercalia festival survived till late 5th century when "Pope Gelasius" officially declared 14th of February as Saint Valentine's Day and announced Lupercalia festival as being un-Christian.